You have a point. But Thunderbird is an email client. I consider Evolution (and Outlook, Groupwise, Kontact) to be a "groupware" app. I really appreciate the seperation. It's why I use Kmail. If I want all the other stuff (and sometimes I do) I can fire up Kontact, but if I want to check my email without loading up a full groupware suite and all the bloat that comes with it, I can. I would hate to see Thunderbird grow into something like Evolution. Evoltion is great for its intended purpose, but I would like to think Thunderbird's purpose isn't the same.
I didn't say that "my" country was ruling responsibly over anything at all. I just implied that they might have a right to.
And on an unrelated note, let me just make mention once again for the more enlightened rest of the world, that my country and my country's government aren't the same entity. And most of us only care about one of the two.
Oh, damn dude... You completely missed the point on that.
I'm not saying that they shouldn't cap my bandwidth. I'm saying that they shouldn't claim not to. If they say "unlimited" then it should be so. It's straight-up false advertising. If a 600 pound dude with a steel oil drum for a stomach waddles up to a buffet table and cleans it out, eating way more than $5.99 worth of food, then that's a risk that the restaurant has just got to accept when they hang up a sign that says "All you can eat for $5.99!"
That never even happened to me in the first place, it was just a fuckin' analogy. Chill out, man. I have a VPS on a fat pipe for my pr0n and BT, where I abuse the bandwidth to my heart's content knowing there's a cap and having agreed to terms that clearly said where it is.
Oh, I'm totally use to it. Sure, it's a fact of life, and a viable business practice. It's also a gamble. When businesses make that gamble, the odds are usually in their favor, but it's still a risk and they must be prepared to lose a time or two.
not everybody goes to WDL every day of the week for the full day.
Yes, but they could if they wanted to. They shouldn't sell shit like that if they're counting on it not being used. This is like a web hosting company overselling its resources, and counting on the fact that the customers won't all decide to use what they bought.
This is their fault. Don't sell me a 6mbps cable modem on an "unlimited usage" plan and bitch at me or shut me off when I max it out. And so what if I share it with my neighbor? The bandwidth has been paid for. If my subscription is a net loss to you, then you should have sold me less or charged me more.
If they want to reward and encourage people who go to Disney parks regularly, maybe they should do it differently. I don't buy some kind of personalized, reduced-rate sandwich card at Subway. They give me these little stamps, that I can redeem later when I have several of them. Maybe they could do some kind of "frequent flyer" style program. Hell, I don't know. There are a hundred other ways to do this that don't involve personal surveillance.
And I'm not even saying that the passes should go unchecked. Maybe their current model is fine. There are other ways to check ID. Maybe instead of machines to scan your hand and get people through lines quicker, they should have more people looking at IDs. (And I mean looking. That's it. That's all that's neccessary. Not writing down what's on it or keying it into a database. That's right, more wage-earnging human beings. Disney can afford it.
I was going to post something about this being an outrage, and that if they want to verify someone's ID they should, well, ask them for ID. But I understand really that they already do that, and the fingerprint scans (Yes, I believe it probably scans and stores the actual fingerprint even if it only uses certain generic points for verification.) are just a way to do what they've always been doing, only faster. Cheaper. So cash-strapped Disney won't have to employ more human eyes to look at cards and move people through lines.
But, this is to protect the passes, and make certain that only the original purchasers use them? They want to make sure a person can't hand off the pass to someone else. But, why is it worth all this? If you have my Disney pass, then I certainly don't have it. It's not like I gave you a copy. I'm not using it if you are. Why do they even give a shit which one of us is in the park, kneeling at the altar of the Golden Mouse and throwing cash at it?
Speaking of phone numbers, and regarding the psychotic school district who charges their curious and evil hacker children as felons when they try to do naughty things with their impenetrable Macs...
The phone number of the Kutztown Borough Police Department is 610-683-3545 and the extension of Officer Walt Skavinsky, who wrote this beautiful thing is 145. If he is not in, please leave a message and he will return it as soon as possible, so says the letter.
If you'd rather fax him something, 610-683-9270 will get the job done.
I was thinking it sounds more like a harpsichord myself. It sounds way too mechanical. I never would have believed those sounds came from a real guitar, despite the fact that they did. And I've been fooled many times by drum machines or elecronic organs/pianos, etc.
Having said that though... That is one hell of a bitchin' harpsichord.
I can back you up on that - it sounds completely nuts but it works.
Couple of years ago I installed some 40 or so computers at a couple of schools in another state a few hundred miles away. Trucked them there in a Uhaul. Started unpacking them, booting them up, and a few failed. No problem, I had extra motherboards and other parts for just this reason... The only problem is, as I kept going I discovered that just under half of them turned out to have a dead BIOS and would not come up at all.
Now, I don't know why that was. I'd had every one of them powered on before I left, because I'd imaged the drives. They all worked fine. I have some half-baked theories, but I still don't know what the hell happened. But here I was getting to the end of the day, I had two labs to get running in two days, and only enough machines for one. God knows how I'd ever get those 18 or so dead motherboards replaced under warranty, but nevermind that, I just didn't want to have to make that trip again, and we absolutely had to have those labs installed now.
So I finished the first lab and took every one of those dead machines up to my hotel room. Myself and another guy popped out all of the BIOS chips. We each took a working machine, booted up, dumped a copy of the flash onto a floppy and then ripped out the BIOS chips while the machines were running. Then we'd put a bad chip in, flash it, pull it out, put it back into a motherboard. I shit you not, my geek bretheren, this actually worked.
While we were at it, we also re-imaged all of the drives, having found out we had additional software to install. It was a long night.
When we installed the second lab, everything worked fine except for one problem. The DHCP server handed out the same IP address to every machine. It took us a a little while to notice this because any machine we tried to use would work great until another one tried to do something on the network. Turns out, all of the on-board NICs ended up with the same MAC address.
We were able to fix that because the BIOS allowed us to change the MAC's. These boards were Biostar M7NCD Pro. Incidentally, this was also the day that the MS Blaster worm hit and crippled teh intarweb. Most of the trip back was spent on the phone.
IDE, though... Oh, yeah. A few years ago the company I worked for sold an assload of AOpen boxes with 10GB Seagate IDE drives to a bunch of schools all over the state. The failure rate on those things was astounding. It got to the point where service calls were costing so much time and money that we were replacing those drives preemptively because we knew we'd be out there again in a month or two because five more had spun out their bearings or started the inevitable death rattle. I once replaced 30 of those things in a single day. These were the drives that had some kind of rubber sleeve around them. It was a long time before I'd trust any data I cared about on a Seagate drive. I used to replace a lot of a particular model IBM Deathsar at the time too.
After that I'd only buy WD disks, but lately the trend at my office seems to be WD 20's and 40's dropping like flies right after the warranty goes out. I'm replacing them with Maxtors, which I'm having much better luck with these days. Eventually though, I'm sure Maxtor will make a certain drive that dies easily, I'll get stuck with a whole bunch of them, and find something else that I think is reliable for a while.
I guess the moral of this sleep-deprived diatribe is that different manufacturers' drives suck more at different times than others' do.
Yes, okay, bad examples. Here's a better one: Company wants to migrate Apple desktops. Company has internal apps developed for Windows, for which there are no Mac ports. Company could use WINE, but chooses Crossover for its usability improvements and GUI tools. Either option is more feasable than re-writing said app(s).
Another example... Yes, Explorer exists for Mac. But many plugins are Windows only. The company I work for uses a massive, custom, in-house developed Oracle Forms app. It's web-deployed, Java, but dependant on a plugin called Jinitiator. Now, I don't know if this exists for Mac, but suppose it doesn't. It certainly doesn't exist for Linux. Crossover Plugin is the only way I can use that app from my Linux workstation and I suspect I'd have to do something similar if I wanted to use an Intel Mac.
I believe there are many more good reasons for Codeweavers and/or WINE to support these new Macs, and the sooner that happens the sooner they'll become a viable option for a lot more people and businesses.
You're right, but Codeweavers Crossover Office does more than that. It's an enhancement to WINE, and supports a whole lot more than just Office. I've used it to run Photoshop, Explorer, and several other things in Linux. They also do browser plugins.
Yep, everything you said is right. I was defending the validity of a "Microsoft of the GIS industry" analogy though, which I doubt you'll disagree with.
I whine and moan the same way a lot of people do. ESRI has a huge following, but their users aren't like Macintosh people. Everyone I know who uses ESRI software does so because it's the only option for what they do. (Or, yes, the best option) As GIS software, their stuff is great and functional. Probably the best under most scenarios. But as software it is never more than beta quality at best! In their market, that's okay for them. They can get away with it because the competition is either not good enough or not easy enough to use.
Could you ever see Adobe staying on top of their market if they had released the last few verions of Photoshop in the kind of ragged condition that ESRI lets past their door?
ESRI does suck less than everyone else, but they still suck, and more than a software company of that size ought to.
Well... It is a good analogy though. They're the biggest, most widely-adopted vendor of GIS software, they're all about vendor lock-in, they adore the "upgrade treadmill" (Anyone ever use ArcInfo 8.x? How long?) and their software is not just buggy, but buggy in a very special way with its nearly unique capacity to infuriate the user, perhaps dare I say, even surpassing that of Microsoft. At least Microsoft's horrorshow improves with each new release. ESRI's just gets different. Features come before bugfixes. Service packs break things. And such conspicuous placement of duct tape. In some ways they're even worse than Microsoft. Their 16-bit ten year old hack ArcView 3.x is still in heavy use because there are things it can do that either can't be done in Arc8/9 or the UI has changed so radically that people just don't know how. And don't mistake that statement to mean that Arc3 is any less buggy, just that it can be more functional. Imagine WinXP, 2000, and 9x all sucking so badly that you had to dual-boot into Windows 3.1 to get any work done.
Yeah, and that's legal. (Or can be) As long as you preserve the copyrights and comply with the GPL you can spin a CD with Firefox on it, give it a snazzy cover, rename the app Generic-ISPWebCruzerLitePro2006 and sell it for $50 a disc if people will buy it. Red Hat, Novell, Linspire, Xandros and Mandriva do it all the time. Perfectly legit to do that with Miranda too if you respect the license.
Actually, yeah, it can hurt an Open Source project. If the pirates who illegally fork the code make good, valuable modifications to it, or bling it up enough, or just by dumb luck their version becomes more popular, then the new, closed-source app can suck up the original's user base, popularity and interest. An illegal fork can kill an OSS project just as fast as a perfectly legitimate fork can, only in the case of the latter, the project moves on in some other form because it's still Free.
Then again... I didn't know shit about Miranda IM before some jackasses ripped it off. I doubt I'm the only one. I'll probably check it out and see if it sucks less than WinGAIM. Maybe this time they actually helped Miranda. Viva Slashdot.
Some difference... Someone downloads an MP3 that they'd never have bought legally if given the opportunity, then they haven't stolen anything. Nobody lost anything. Some kid downloads a warez copy of Photoshop knowing there's no way in hell he'd have been able to afford it in the first place, then nothing's stolen. Nobody lost anything. In fact, if a few thousand kids do that and get some skills with the software, then it actually helps later on when they go to work and get asked to spend the company's money on a graphics app. (Although that's beside the point) Someone downloads warez for eval, then nobody's lost anything unless the person doesn't buy it instead of just wishing he hadn't bought it. (Would you buy a car without a test drive? Did you steal that time behind the wheel when you decided to get something else?) If someone dowloads a movie that they wouldn't have ever paid to see, no one's lost anything.
On the flip side though, when someone diverts profit...
Someone downloads a movie, makes a few dozen DVDs with inkjet-printed labels and sells them out of the trunk of a Caprice across the street from Blockbuster or the movie theater for five bucks? That's stealing. A person or entity who can plainly afford and otherwise would buy that copy of Photoshop if it weren't so easy to get warez? That's stealing. Get a bunch of albums off Kazaa or Gnutella and sell 'em to people who'd otherwise have bought them legitimately? Stealing. Grab a GPL'ed app, hide what it is, snatch out all the copyrights, credits and license, bundle some spyware/adware with it and seek revenue from advertisers? Oh you better believe that's stealing.
Oh, you're dead right. I totally agree with that. Television is a whole other can of worms. Spending several hours a day in front of the TV, especially watching mindless drivel that doesn't teach anything, is just as much if not more of a waste of life in my opinion. As for what gaming teaches... Well I think after a certain point it only hones one's skills at being a better gamer most of the time. Buf if you argue that it's the lesser of two evils, then I think you're probably right in most cases.
Slashdot Mirror
You have a point. But Thunderbird is an email client. I consider Evolution (and Outlook, Groupwise, Kontact) to be a "groupware" app. I really appreciate the seperation. It's why I use Kmail. If I want all the other stuff (and sometimes I do) I can fire up Kontact, but if I want to check my email without loading up a full groupware suite and all the bloat that comes with it, I can. I would hate to see Thunderbird grow into something like Evolution. Evoltion is great for its intended purpose, but I would like to think Thunderbird's purpose isn't the same.
Dude... I'm not into paintball... But where is your store? Paintball *shit* I would definitely buy! Think of the possibilities.
Yeah... Pretty lame. Probably 'cause you actually came out and used the word "Linux."
Partimage gets my vote. All you need is Knoppix. I even wrote a how-to for n00bs on the subject.
I didn't say that "my" country was ruling responsibly over anything at all. I just implied that they might have a right to. And on an unrelated note, let me just make mention once again for the more enlightened rest of the world, that my country and my country's government aren't the same entity. And most of us only care about one of the two.
The US did invent the damn thing...
Oh, damn dude... You completely missed the point on that.
I'm not saying that they shouldn't cap my bandwidth. I'm saying that they shouldn't claim not to. If they say "unlimited" then it should be so. It's straight-up false advertising. If a 600 pound dude with a steel oil drum for a stomach waddles up to a buffet table and cleans it out, eating way more than $5.99 worth of food, then that's a risk that the restaurant has just got to accept when they hang up a sign that says "All you can eat for $5.99!"
That never even happened to me in the first place, it was just a fuckin' analogy. Chill out, man. I have a VPS on a fat pipe for my pr0n and BT, where I abuse the bandwidth to my heart's content knowing there's a cap and having agreed to terms that clearly said where it is.
Oh, I'm totally use to it. Sure, it's a fact of life, and a viable business practice. It's also a gamble. When businesses make that gamble, the odds are usually in their favor, but it's still a risk and they must be prepared to lose a time or two.
not everybody goes to WDL every day of the week for the full day.
Yes, but they could if they wanted to. They shouldn't sell shit like that if they're counting on it not being used. This is like a web hosting company overselling its resources, and counting on the fact that the customers won't all decide to use what they bought.
This is their fault. Don't sell me a 6mbps cable modem on an "unlimited usage" plan and bitch at me or shut me off when I max it out. And so what if I share it with my neighbor? The bandwidth has been paid for. If my subscription is a net loss to you, then you should have sold me less or charged me more.
If they want to reward and encourage people who go to Disney parks regularly, maybe they should do it differently. I don't buy some kind of personalized, reduced-rate sandwich card at Subway. They give me these little stamps, that I can redeem later when I have several of them. Maybe they could do some kind of "frequent flyer" style program. Hell, I don't know. There are a hundred other ways to do this that don't involve personal surveillance.
And I'm not even saying that the passes should go unchecked. Maybe their current model is fine. There are other ways to check ID. Maybe instead of machines to scan your hand and get people through lines quicker, they should have more people looking at IDs. (And I mean looking. That's it. That's all that's neccessary. Not writing down what's on it or keying it into a database. That's right, more wage-earnging human beings. Disney can afford it.
I was going to post something about this being an outrage, and that if they want to verify someone's ID they should, well, ask them for ID. But I understand really that they already do that, and the fingerprint scans (Yes, I believe it probably scans and stores the actual fingerprint even if it only uses certain generic points for verification.) are just a way to do what they've always been doing, only faster. Cheaper. So cash-strapped Disney won't have to employ more human eyes to look at cards and move people through lines.
But, this is to protect the passes, and make certain that only the original purchasers use them? They want to make sure a person can't hand off the pass to someone else. But, why is it worth all this? If you have my Disney pass, then I certainly don't have it. It's not like I gave you a copy. I'm not using it if you are. Why do they even give a shit which one of us is in the park, kneeling at the altar of the Golden Mouse and throwing cash at it?
Fuck Disney.
Speaking of phone numbers, and regarding the psychotic school district who charges their curious and evil hacker children as felons when they try to do naughty things with their impenetrable Macs...
The phone number of the Kutztown Borough Police Department is 610-683-3545 and the extension of Officer Walt Skavinsky, who wrote this beautiful thing is 145. If he is not in, please leave a message and he will return it as soon as possible, so says the letter.
If you'd rather fax him something, 610-683-9270 will get the job done.
Yeah,Definantly.
I was thinking it sounds more like a harpsichord myself. It sounds way too mechanical. I never would have believed those sounds came from a real guitar, despite the fact that they did. And I've been fooled many times by drum machines or elecronic organs/pianos, etc.
Having said that though... That is one hell of a bitchin' harpsichord.
I can back you up on that - it sounds completely nuts but it works.
Couple of years ago I installed some 40 or so computers at a couple of schools in another state a few hundred miles away. Trucked them there in a Uhaul. Started unpacking them, booting them up, and a few failed. No problem, I had extra motherboards and other parts for just this reason... The only problem is, as I kept going I discovered that just under half of them turned out to have a dead BIOS and would not come up at all.
Now, I don't know why that was. I'd had every one of them powered on before I left, because I'd imaged the drives. They all worked fine. I have some half-baked theories, but I still don't know what the hell happened. But here I was getting to the end of the day, I had two labs to get running in two days, and only enough machines for one. God knows how I'd ever get those 18 or so dead motherboards replaced under warranty, but nevermind that, I just didn't want to have to make that trip again, and we absolutely had to have those labs installed now.
So I finished the first lab and took every one of those dead machines up to my hotel room. Myself and another guy popped out all of the BIOS chips. We each took a working machine, booted up, dumped a copy of the flash onto a floppy and then ripped out the BIOS chips while the machines were running. Then we'd put a bad chip in, flash it, pull it out, put it back into a motherboard. I shit you not, my geek bretheren, this actually worked.
While we were at it, we also re-imaged all of the drives, having found out we had additional software to install. It was a long night.
When we installed the second lab, everything worked fine except for one problem. The DHCP server handed out the same IP address to every machine. It took us a a little while to notice this because any machine we tried to use would work great until another one tried to do something on the network. Turns out, all of the on-board NICs ended up with the same MAC address.
We were able to fix that because the BIOS allowed us to change the MAC's. These boards were Biostar M7NCD Pro. Incidentally, this was also the day that the MS Blaster worm hit and crippled teh intarweb. Most of the trip back was spent on the phone.
Fo' shizzle.
I've rarely seen a Seagate SCSI disk fail.
IDE, though... Oh, yeah. A few years ago the company I worked for sold an assload of AOpen boxes with 10GB Seagate IDE drives to a bunch of schools all over the state. The failure rate on those things was astounding. It got to the point where service calls were costing so much time and money that we were replacing those drives preemptively because we knew we'd be out there again in a month or two because five more had spun out their bearings or started the inevitable death rattle. I once replaced 30 of those things in a single day. These were the drives that had some kind of rubber sleeve around them. It was a long time before I'd trust any data I cared about on a Seagate drive. I used to replace a lot of a particular model IBM Deathsar at the time too.
After that I'd only buy WD disks, but lately the trend at my office seems to be WD 20's and 40's dropping like flies right after the warranty goes out. I'm replacing them with Maxtors, which I'm having much better luck with these days. Eventually though, I'm sure Maxtor will make a certain drive that dies easily, I'll get stuck with a whole bunch of them, and find something else that I think is reliable for a while.
I guess the moral of this sleep-deprived diatribe is that different manufacturers' drives suck more at different times than others' do.
Yes, okay, bad examples. Here's a better one: Company wants to migrate Apple desktops. Company has internal apps developed for Windows, for which there are no Mac ports. Company could use WINE, but chooses Crossover for its usability improvements and GUI tools. Either option is more feasable than re-writing said app(s).
Another example... Yes, Explorer exists for Mac. But many plugins are Windows only. The company I work for uses a massive, custom, in-house developed Oracle Forms app. It's web-deployed, Java, but dependant on a plugin called Jinitiator. Now, I don't know if this exists for Mac, but suppose it doesn't. It certainly doesn't exist for Linux. Crossover Plugin is the only way I can use that app from my Linux workstation and I suspect I'd have to do something similar if I wanted to use an Intel Mac.
I believe there are many more good reasons for Codeweavers and/or WINE to support these new Macs, and the sooner that happens the sooner they'll become a viable option for a lot more people and businesses.
You're right, but Codeweavers Crossover Office does more than that. It's an enhancement to WINE, and supports a whole lot more than just Office. I've used it to run Photoshop, Explorer, and several other things in Linux. They also do browser plugins.
Yep, everything you said is right. I was defending the validity of a "Microsoft of the GIS industry" analogy though, which I doubt you'll disagree with.
I whine and moan the same way a lot of people do. ESRI has a huge following, but their users aren't like Macintosh people. Everyone I know who uses ESRI software does so because it's the only option for what they do. (Or, yes, the best option) As GIS software, their stuff is great and functional. Probably the best under most scenarios. But as software it is never more than beta quality at best! In their market, that's okay for them. They can get away with it because the competition is either not good enough or not easy enough to use.
Could you ever see Adobe staying on top of their market if they had released the last few verions of Photoshop in the kind of ragged condition that ESRI lets past their door?
ESRI does suck less than everyone else, but they still suck, and more than a software company of that size ought to.
Well... It is a good analogy though. They're the biggest, most widely-adopted vendor of GIS software, they're all about vendor lock-in, they adore the "upgrade treadmill" (Anyone ever use ArcInfo 8.x? How long?) and their software is not just buggy, but buggy in a very special way with its nearly unique capacity to infuriate the user, perhaps dare I say, even surpassing that of Microsoft. At least Microsoft's horrorshow improves with each new release. ESRI's just gets different. Features come before bugfixes. Service packs break things. And such conspicuous placement of duct tape. In some ways they're even worse than Microsoft. Their 16-bit ten year old hack ArcView 3.x is still in heavy use because there are things it can do that either can't be done in Arc8/9 or the UI has changed so radically that people just don't know how. And don't mistake that statement to mean that Arc3 is any less buggy, just that it can be more functional. Imagine WinXP, 2000, and 9x all sucking so badly that you had to dual-boot into Windows 3.1 to get any work done.
That is why ESRI sucks.
-An ESRI user.
Well that's easy. I would have been a pirate.
Yeah, and that's legal. (Or can be) As long as you preserve the copyrights and comply with the GPL you can spin a CD with Firefox on it, give it a snazzy cover, rename the app Generic-ISPWebCruzerLitePro2006 and sell it for $50 a disc if people will buy it. Red Hat, Novell, Linspire, Xandros and Mandriva do it all the time. Perfectly legit to do that with Miranda too if you respect the license.
Actually, yeah, it can hurt an Open Source project. If the pirates who illegally fork the code make good, valuable modifications to it, or bling it up enough, or just by dumb luck their version becomes more popular, then the new, closed-source app can suck up the original's user base, popularity and interest. An illegal fork can kill an OSS project just as fast as a perfectly legitimate fork can, only in the case of the latter, the project moves on in some other form because it's still Free.
Then again... I didn't know shit about Miranda IM before some jackasses ripped it off. I doubt I'm the only one. I'll probably check it out and see if it sucks less than WinGAIM. Maybe this time they actually helped Miranda. Viva Slashdot.
Some difference... Someone downloads an MP3 that they'd never have bought legally if given the opportunity, then they haven't stolen anything. Nobody lost anything. Some kid downloads a warez copy of Photoshop knowing there's no way in hell he'd have been able to afford it in the first place, then nothing's stolen. Nobody lost anything. In fact, if a few thousand kids do that and get some skills with the software, then it actually helps later on when they go to work and get asked to spend the company's money on a graphics app. (Although that's beside the point) Someone downloads warez for eval, then nobody's lost anything unless the person doesn't buy it instead of just wishing he hadn't bought it. (Would you buy a car without a test drive? Did you steal that time behind the wheel when you decided to get something else?) If someone dowloads a movie that they wouldn't have ever paid to see, no one's lost anything.
On the flip side though, when someone diverts profit...
Someone downloads a movie, makes a few dozen DVDs with inkjet-printed labels and sells them out of the trunk of a Caprice across the street from Blockbuster or the movie theater for five bucks? That's stealing. A person or entity who can plainly afford and otherwise would buy that copy of Photoshop if it weren't so easy to get warez? That's stealing. Get a bunch of albums off Kazaa or Gnutella and sell 'em to people who'd otherwise have bought them legitimately? Stealing. Grab a GPL'ed app, hide what it is, snatch out all the copyrights, credits and license, bundle some spyware/adware with it and seek revenue from advertisers? Oh you better believe that's stealing.
See the difference?
Oh, you're dead right. I totally agree with that. Television is a whole other can of worms. Spending several hours a day in front of the TV, especially watching mindless drivel that doesn't teach anything, is just as much if not more of a waste of life in my opinion. As for what gaming teaches... Well I think after a certain point it only hones one's skills at being a better gamer most of the time. Buf if you argue that it's the lesser of two evils, then I think you're probably right in most cases.